The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (34 page)

Bea and Philippe gave us a car tour of the Champs-Élysées, which ended at a nearby restaurant that had been recommended to me by a maître d’ in New Orleans. Hannah and I were so waylaid by jet lag that we could hardly pay attention to the meal. The Delansays dropped us at our hotel and promised to meet us in front of Notre Dame cathedral the next morning for Easter high mass.

Hannah and I met downstairs in time to get breakfast before mass. Walking along Boulevard Saint-Germain, the first open café we came
to was none other than the Café de Flore, famed hangout of Parisian writers and intellectuals, including Hemingway, who is said to have written part of
A Moveable Feast
there. We took a table at one of the red leather banquettes and had croissants, butter, and café au lait, then hurried through the Latin Quarter and across the river to the cathedral.

As we stood with Philippe and Bea under the great arches of Notre Dame, listening to the Latin chants fill the vault, I wondered if the stones spoke to Hannah’s soul as the stones of Chartres had spoken to mine. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled nervously, but said nothing.

Oh look, you’re doing just what you swore you wouldn’t,
I reproached myself.
You can’t just leave the moment alone, can you? You have to pin the butterfly to the desk. Let it fly!

After the mass we beavered through the throng in front of the cathedral, crossed the Petit Pont back to the Latin Quarter, and landed at Le Petit Pontoise, a tiny restaurant specializing in French country
cuisine de grand-mère
. We walked off the repast in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Bea and Hannah spoke privately, and Philippe and I talked about what it means to move home for the sake of family. A decade earlier Philippe helped found a software company in Silicon Valley and had been quite successful. But after years of living the fabled American dream, he and Beatrice had moved with their children to the Netherlands. Bea’s mother had died, and her family needed them.

“When y’all moved back,” I told my friend, “I was secretly happy. Even though it means we probably won’t get to see y’all as often; for some reason I wanted Leon and Sophie to grow up knowing their European heritage, not as Californians.”

“It was the right thing to do, no doubt about it,” Philippe told me. “But it’s hard. You know, we lived in Tokyo for a while before we married, and then we had all those years in California. It’s tough when you go home, though, because if you’ve lived all those other places, and had all those different experiences, it’s hard to relate to the people
you grew up with. It’s not your fault, and it’s not their fault. But all our friends who have done what we’ve done have the same experience.”

He was right, of course. You can’t unsee what you have seen, unlearn what you have learned. The only way to live entirely at ease with one’s hometown is never to have left, never to have seen how life is elsewhere, right? Or maybe not. Ruthie’s nature was not my nature. For me the only reason I was able to return to St. Francisville in the middle of my life was because I left it so long ago and satisfied my curiosity about the world beyond. Had I chosen Ruthie’s path when I was young, my way through life would likely have been bitter, filled with regret about the roads not taken.

Could the Simmons sisters be my role models? They had lived all over, but returned to Starhill, the place of their birth, to live out their last years in a tin-roofed cabin under a Chinese rain tree. Despite their poverty and great distance from the grand boulevards of the cultural capitals, Lois and Hilda created a salon for themselves. And Paris would always be within them—the city’s mythic allure was still strong enough in them at the end of their lives to pass Paris onto a boy in diapers.

Later I tried to talk to my niece about her experience at Notre Dame, but she deflected my questions. As we walked around the city and I would ask her what she thought of a building, she would demur. On the evening of our last full day in Paris, I told Hannah I was going to take the train in the morning from Gare Montparnasse to Chartres, to pray in the cathedral.

“Uncle Rod, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to stay in the city and go to the Musée d’Orsay instead,” she said.

I was crestfallen. How could a teenager mourning her dead mother prefer to open herself to the lightness, color, and gaiety of the world of the French Impressionists when she could be tromping around a gray Gothic pile with her flying butthead of an uncle, contemplating God, medievalism, and the meaning of life?

The question is ridiculous, of course.
Remember, Hannah’s Paris is not necessarily going to be your Paris. Maybe this is for the best,
I thought.
That girl has had a lot more religion in her life than I had at her age, and a lot less art.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Just be careful.”

“I will. Thank you, Uncle Rod.”

The next morning I took a taxi to Gare Montparnasse and took a train to the southwest of Paris, to Chartres. Two hours later I found myself standing at the heart of the medieval labyrinth on the cathedral floor, gazing at the rose window on the west portal, trying to recapture the shock of awe that captivated my imagination at seventeen. It would not come. You can meet your true love for the first time only once.

But then, I, a believing pilgrim, did not need that awe now as I needed it then. It was enough to stand here, in the presence of God, and in this incomparable house built to His glory, and in honor of the Virgin Mary, and to be grateful. With the noonday sun streaming pale on my face through the image of Christ the Judge, I prayed for Ruthie’s soul and for our family back home, and I grieved for how cracked and broken we all are. Love is the only thing that can fill in the cracks and make us whole and strong again.

There is a side altar in the cathedral where pilgrims can light candles and kneel in prayer. I said a rosary there for my family. As I walked away I saw a plaque on a pillar, honoring the poet Charles Péguy, who walked from Paris to Chartres in 1912 to pray for his sick child. Péguy, shot dead in the war two years later, revived the medieval custom of the Paris-to-Chartres pilgrimage. In
The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
, his book-length poem to the Virgin Mary, Péguy said there are two kinds of saints: those who come from the armies of the righteous, and those who come from the ranks of sinners: “Those who have never caused any worry, any serious dread, and those who have almost caused despair.” Two paths diverging in the wood, but both leading home to heaven. Péguy continues:

Thus God did not want

It wouldn’t have pleased him

To have only one voice in the concert.

I spoke to my sister in prayer, asking her to help me find my way home, and in so doing I felt again the distance between us. Then I asked her to pray for me, to help me be at peace with her memory.

And then I said good-bye to Chartres, where I first learned to delight in God.

Walking up Boulevard Saint-Germain to our last dinner in Paris, Hannah gushed about her day in the museum, and how she bought a bottle of wine, some cheese and some bread, and had a picnic on a quai by the river. Yes, it had been the right thing to let my niece have this day on her own, to guide herself by her own desires. As we waited in front of Les Deux Magots to cross the boulevard, she said something startling.

“I thought I would come here and never want to go home,” Hannah said. “I found out, though, that I miss my family a lot more than I thought I would. I don’t ever want to live too far from them. And I need to be closer to the country than I thought. Are you disappointed?”

“Hannah, that’s great,” I said. “No way am I disappointed. That surprises me too, but see, Paris showed you something important about yourself.”

“I’m afraid I disappointed you,” she said, as we crossed the street. “I think you wanted me to have this big intellectual experience. To me it was just a great vacation. I’ve been so sad since Mama died, and it was so much fun to leave all that behind, and just enjoy myself.”

“I’m sorry if I made you feel that way. Paris gave you what you needed now. You can always come back for the rest, if you want. My Paris isn’t your Paris, and that’s okay.”

We turned onto Rue Montfaucon and stepped into a petite oyster bar, clean, bright, and crisp as freshly starched tablecloths, and took a
table at the far wall. Philippe had introduced me to raw French oysters on Sunday night, at a place in the Marais, and I had been knocked flat by their intense flavor. They were grenades of the sea, exploding with salt, iodine, and the taste of the ocean—and they had instantly made of me a traitor to my beloved Louisiana oysters. It turned out that Huitrerie Regis, one of the best oyster bars in the entire city, was there in our neighborhood. This was my second visit there on this vacation.

We ordered our oysters—exquisite
fines de claires—
and two glasses of Sancerre. Soon the server returned with a platter of glistening oysters on the half shell, resting on a bed of crushed ice beribboned with seaweed. I plucked a shell out with my left hand, gently loosened the oyster from its shell with my fork, and slurped it down.

I sipped my wine, then began subjecting my poor niece to an achingly sincere and Sancerre-addled oration about how the deliciousness of oysters tells us something about the nature of God. Hannah listened to a few minutes of this pretentious codswallop. Finally she couldn’t take a second more.

“Uncle Rod, you’re too intense!” she spat. “Remember, Mama made fun of you and your friend in college, sitting there talking about philosophy? She was happier than you, and she had a good life. Why shouldn’t I live that way?”

That stung. As we made our way through the oysters, I conceded that yes, my weakness was to overintellectualize everything, but that she had no way of knowing that her mother was happier than I. If happiness means the absence of internal conflict, then yes, Ruthie was happier.

“She kept that up by refusing to think about anything that upset her settled opinions,” I said. “That’s not going to work for you. You are too curious! If you decide you have to hide from the big questions to be happy, you are going to spend your whole life running faster and faster to stay ahead of them. You can’t live that way. It’s always better to live in the truth, as hard as it is, than to live a happy lie.”

We paid our bill and stepped stiff-legged and nervous out into the cool night air. It began to rain softly. We walked back down the boulevard, toward Rue du Bac, looking for a place to have dinner after our oyster appetizer. The evening seemed to be listing beyond my control.

“Uncle Rod, I need to tell you something,” Hannah said, her voice rising. “I really think you and Aunt Julie should stop trying so hard to get close to Claire and Rebekah. It’s not going to work.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were raised in a house where our Mama a lot of times had a bad opinion of you,” she said. “She never talked bad about you to us, but we could tell that she didn’t like the way you lived. We could hear the things she said, and Paw too. I had a bad opinion of you myself, until I started coming to visit y’all, and I saw how wrong they were.

“I was fifteen the first time I did that,” she continued. “My sisters are still young. They don’t know any different. All they know is how we were raised. It makes me sad to see you and Aunt Julie trying so hard, me knowing you’re not going to get anywhere. I don’t want y’all to be hurt.”

I
was
hurt. And furious because Hannah told me that her mother’s criticism carried on beyond that moment on Ruthie’s front porch the week of her diagnosis, when I thought everything was made right between us. Things were fine, Ruthie had said, but in truth they weren’t fine. With this sudden revelation, I felt trapped by my family’s legacy—and unable to do anything about it. How could I compete with the lasting power of Ruthie’s judgment—and, to a lesser extent, Paw’s? I wanted to be a different man, a better man, but in that emotionally charged moment it looked like Ruthie had closed the minds of her children to the possibility that I had anything worthwhile to offer them.

In fact it felt like 1994 all over again: the same feeling I had the night Paw told me that he was glad I had come home because it meant I accepted that he had been right. That ghost found me all these
years later, on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Once again it frightened and humiliated me, but this time it was even scarier. In ninety-four I was the only victim of my bad judgment. Now I had uprooted my wife and children because of what now looked like my foolish belief that our family could change, and that we could live in peace and mutual acceptance. As I stalked up the boulevard with Hannah, my heart pounded less from our pace and more from a crushing feeling of betrayal and self-loathing. I had been seduced by my own chronic yearning to return to a sense of unity with my family and my home, and, in the high emotion following Ruthie’s death, had allowed myself to be seduced.

My stomach knotted and my throat tightened.

“Let me tell you something,” I growled. “Sometimes your mother and your grandfather could be ignorant and mean. They had no idea what they were talking about. They just judged. Why do you think I had to get out of there? I couldn’t take it! Do you understand that Julie and I uprooted our family and moved to Louisiana, mostly for your sisters? And now you’re telling me that Ruthie poisoned the well for them.”

I regretted these words as soon as I said them. My temper had gotten the best of me, and I had spoken out of hurt and fear, piercing my niece’s heart with the sharpness of my words. She had no way to comprehend the long and difficult family history that provoked a reaction in me that must have seemed wildly disproportionate. The kid did not deserve this.

Hannah started to cry. “I wish I had never told you!”

“No,” I said. “No. I’m glad you told me. Didn’t I just tell you it’s always better to live in truth than to live a lie? You did the right thing. Honest, you did.”